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What can I say, it's the time of year where I fondly think back to spending many a 4th of july working in a local grocery store then coming home to enjoy fireworks in SWG. My reminiscing seems to have sent me to these forums for some good old SWG talk.

With that said, what would you have done differently in SWG. Not doing the NGE or Cu is an obvious one. Keeping it in beta for another 3-6 months so it came out cleaner and with more of the features it was missing (speeders anyone?) is another obvious one.

Something I have thought long and hard about was launching with around 3 larger planets that were full of content. Maybe Tat, Naboo, and Endor. Making those three really shine, then launching another new planet every 3 months for the first couple of years. My logic is that this would have produced less buggy more content filled planets while also giving us something new to look forward to.

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More rigidity with selecting skills across professions. If I remember correctly, there were 32 professions allowing players to really customize their character. The issue was that players could go fairly deep into some of the combat trees, which wreaked havoc on defense and offense min-maxing. Anyone remember the hour(s) long fencing duals?

Creating a truly random path to unlocking Jedi. Holocrons were ... well to be somewhat more politically correct ... unsmart. If the designers could create a random set of professions from an object, why not expand the system a little more to aspects of exploration and accomplishments? Unlocking Jedi should've been truly unique and not simply an act of grinding through professions.

Open the bounty system to all factions and players. As a MBH there was nothing more I hated than to be relegated to hunting Jedi. SOE/LA should've taken a page from CCP and opened player bounties.

Create a benefit for players to keep houses close to NPC cities. When player cities were released a diaspora of sorts occurred. Prior to player cities I felt a real sense of overall community in and around NPC cities. On Kettemoor, Moenia was a real hub of Rebel activity and felt like a secluded haven away from the Imperial cities, like Theed.

That's just a small list. Of course thematically SWG's original design was simply too ambitious a project for SOE/LA. There were few features of SWG that wasn't borked to some degree or another, but one thing people held onto was the game's Potential(tm).

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Originally posted by eykosurf

Creating a truly random path to unlocking Jedi.

Agreed, and I think a system more aligned with 'high school politics' should have been in place, believe it or not. The only way you should have become a Jedi is if another one lets you in on it, then tie in the loss of Jedi through permadeath and/or other factors to taking the whole light/dark side down a peg, to where they would only take in the best and most active, and shun the rest. The question then, though; is how do you determine the first one?

Open the bounty system to all factions and players.

Agreed, but IMO, it should pretty much still be aligned to classes. Jedi and Smugglers, namely. There really isn't a way to determine a criminal in the game in any case other than those, because PvP was a flagged system. If it was FFAPvP, then I could see the system extending to the lot of them.

Create a benefit for players to keep houses close to NPC cities.

I would have taken it in a completely different direction. I would have the many unique houses in the cities be rentable by Players and have them take up housing slots (even more than usual, based on location and demand). Then prevented the placement of houses from upwards of 7.5k-10k meters from the cities. The rings that formed around them were just a mess, and I think all the unused space *within* the cities worked just fine, and should have been put to use. Perhaps even extending the size of the NPC cities over time to suit demand.

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You made a Jedi pre-cu? Congrats, you helped ruin the game. If I could do it all over again, I would have passed on SWG because it seriously has set the bar way too high for MMO expectations and Im jealous that I cannot be as easily amused as some of the raving themepark junkies around here. I wish I could be tripping over myself to play GW2, but Ive seen what an mmorpg has the true potential to be and I just cant get as excited about these themeparks as much as I wish I could. TSW is gorgeous, with great quests and the atmosphere is amazing. But sooner or later, Im going to want my virtual world to offer more than combat centric systems.

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Originally posted by eykosurfMore rigidity with selecting skills across professions. If I remember correctly, there were 32 professions allowing players to really customize their character. The issue was that players could go fairly deep into some of the combat trees, which wreaked havoc on defense and offense min-maxing. Anyone remember the hour(s) long fencing duals?

Creating a truly random path to unlocking Jedi. Holocrons were ... well to be somewhat more politically correct ... unsmart. If the designers could create a random set of professions from an object, why not expand the system a little more to aspects of exploration and accomplishments? Unlocking Jedi should've been truly unique and not simply an act of grinding through professions.

Open the bounty system to all factions and players. As a MBH there was nothing more I hated than to be relegated to hunting Jedi. SOE/LA should've taken a page from CCP and opened player bounties.

Create a benefit for players to keep houses close to NPC cities. When player cities were released a diaspora of sorts occurred. Prior to player cities I felt a real sense of overall community in and around NPC cities. On Kettemoor, Moenia was a real hub of Rebel activity and felt like a secluded haven away from the Imperial cities, like Theed.

That's just a small list. Of course thematically SWG's original design was simply too ambitious a project for SOE/LA. There were few features of SWG that wasn't borked to some degree or another, but one thing people held onto was the game's Potential(tm).

4. Take pvp seriously. Huttball (and the other scenarios) is not pvp it's a trip back to the playground. Imagine if every time there was a conflict in the Star Wars movies, it became SW:ToR instanced BG fighting. That's about as non-epic as you can imagine.

5. This is reiterating #2, but seeing jedi everywhere I look is just plain childish. They should have known better.

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1. Three factions (2 faction model has been done to death and one side is always top heavy).

*sigh* Really?... It's Star Wars, there is only two to consider.

Space technically had 3, with the Empire/Rebels and Neutrals, and the only way I could see 3 working is if it kept that same flavor by having a Criminal faction that can aid either tha Empire or Rebels at a moment's notice. I would *NEVER* add something to an IP simply for the sake of wanting to see something uncomplimentary to it in action. It's just wrong.

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Jump to Lightspeed shoudl've been based on X-Wing / TIE Fighter video game series and NOT based on Wing Commander.

They should've based the Rebels on a space fleet and focused on the Galactic Civil War more heavily from the get-go.... fixed bugs in the general game world and just kept adding content based on the ORIGINAL VISION of "living in the Star Wars galaxy.".

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I would have never used the SW IP. This game would still be around today if SOE had created their own IP for it. I played the game for years and in all that time I never thought it captured what SW was on the screen. Not even remotely.

A different IP could have opened up so many more possibilities. Instead the game was trapped in an unforgiving timeline and thanks to cross promotion they kept trying to shove material from Episodes 1,2,and 3 in there and that never fit. ToOW was a perfect example. I always felt like nothing new ever really happened in SWG. We were always revisiting something or someplace from the past. It just felt cheap.

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I had no problem at all with the CU...In fact I loved it and so did my Guild which thrived on Flurry during that period...I would have simply kept the CU...Added the Instances and more Planets...Built on the Level Cap content...That sort of thing...I think as a base the CU was fine...It just needed time to develop...JMO...

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Having a dancer be a class that actually means something. I mean it looked like it might end up as something and then they made it not at all worthwhile. I thought this one had a real possibility of turning into something unique but that was a road not taken.

Do not allow lower levels to group up with high levels and just blast through levels like crazy.

Do not have fluff skills make it so you are less apt at other skills. IE if they wanted to have a limit on combat skills, fine, but dont have being a merchant make you less able to perform in combat.

And of course not making the devastating mistakes and having a completely different system for becoming a jedi.

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Originally posted by KyngBills

I had no problem at all with the CU...In fact I loved it and so did my Guild which thrived on Flurry during that period...I would have simply kept the CU...Added the Instances and more Planets...Built on the Level Cap content...That sort of thing...I think as a base the CU was fine...It just needed time to develop...JMO...

The CU had many good features... and one horrendously bad one: levels. Having made the bad decision to impose levels on a game that wasn't built for them, the devs compounded the error by dividing skills so that some granted combat levels and others did not. Now anyone with a skill set that mixed combat with entertainment or crafting was screwed.

They should have left out the levels. Without them, everything else in the CU ranged from tolerable to excellent. The official excuse for them, "It makes it easier and faster to add new content!" always seemed bogus to me. It's one of the things that inclines me to the belief that the CU was always planned as the first stage of implementing the NGE.